Marquette Hall room 100, where many university students sit crabbily
and fall asleep to their professor’s monotone voice throughout the week,
buzzed with students Sunday night. They were there for the academic
screening of “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican,” a documentary film about a
movement supporting women seeking to be ordained as priests in the Roman
Catholic Church.
The 58-minute film and attached academic event was sponsored by Marquette’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program and
shared the views of men and women who encourage the ordination of
women, along with those who oppose it. Janice Sevre-Duszynska, one of 12
women ordained in 2006 on the waters outside of Pittsburgh, was at the
screening and shared her story with the audience and partook in the
question-and-answer session after.
“Pink Smoke Over the Vatican” shares the stories of men and women who
are working to put an end to the “underlying misogyny and outdated
feudal governance that is slowly destroying the Roman Catholic Church,”
the video’s website said. The name comes from supporters’ actions
on April 17, 2005 when they released pink smoke in front of several U.S.
cathedrals in an attempt to call churches to open doors fully to women
participation.
At the beginning of the documentary the narrator continuously repeats
the question, “Where are the women’s voices?” and then cites the 1024
Canon Law that says only a baptized male can be ordained.
Dr. Dorothy Irvin, a Roman Catholic theologian, explained in the film
that the woman’s role in the church was eradicated after the Roman
Empire made Catholicism its official religion. Before this, women were
ordained and practiced the sacraments, all proven by the discovery of mosaics in South Africa and pictures in catacombs across the world.
Link (here) to Marquette Tribune
6 comments:
I've always wondered what supports of women's ordination who claim that they desire to allow women's voices to be heard have to say about the many women in the Church that do not want women to be priests.
This film will also be shown on April 10, 2012 7pm at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in NYC, 55 W 15th Street.
It's not a "woman's issue"--it's an issue for all the faithful.
Things will change. . .
No matter how hard the world tries, female priests will always be impossible. It's like a man giving birth to a child.
The Ordination of Women to the Catholic Priesthood
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
Presented at the Canon Law Convention,
Worcester, MA., May 2, 1974
Excerpt
"The unbroken practiced Tradition of the Church has excluded women from the Episcopal and priestly office. Theologians and canonists, building on the teaching of the Fathers, have been unanimous in considering this exclusion absolute and of divine origin.
We therefore conclude that this constant tradition and practice is of divine law, and is of such a nature as to constitute a clear teaching of the infallible ordinary magisterium of the Church. Though not formally defined, it is irreversible Catholic doctrine.
From another perspective, suppose we took the opposite position, advocated by proponents of women’s ordination. If the choice of men by Christ and by the Church has really been only time-conditioned and changeable, then indeed very unpleasant consequences could be drawn.
This attempted solution proceeds from the idea that Jesus, if He had lived in another time and in another land, could have also chosen women. This theory thus grants that there could be another time (or place) in which women could be completely appropriate for the fullness of the hierarchical and sacerdotal office.
But then what follows? It follows that the Catholic Church and its supposedly divine office of mediation of grace stand fixed in a social ethos—that of the first century—which stands diametrically opposed to the ethos of the century in which the Church now lives.
Grant this hypothesis and no single teaching of the Christ or the apostolic Church remains normative for all times. Instead of transcending time, Christianity would become the slave of time. The Beatitudes and the whole Sermon on the Mount, the precept of monogamy and the prohibition of adultery would become –as not a few are now urging—moral archaisms that had meaning and relevance in former days but are no longer meaningful and certainly not mandatory in our day.
If someone objects that the ordination of men by Christ and the early Church was simply a contingent fact; that it could have been otherwise, I grant the observation. But since when are Christians to stand in judgment on why God did what He did, like become man, when the world could have (absolutely speaking) been redeemed without the Incarnation; or why God does what He does, like nourish us with His own Body and Blood when our spiritual life could (absolutely speaking) be sustained by other means if He had so chosen?
One of the great blessings I see coming from the present discussion about the ordination of women is our deeper realization of God’s wisdom in providing for a variety of ways He can be loved, and a bewildering diversity of ministries by which He can be served.
It is for us to stand in awe, and not in judgment, on the ways of God who chose a woman and not a man by whom to enter the world. If this was selectivity, and it was, it was not discrimination. God never does things without good reasons, even when these reasons escape or elude us, who—would you believe—sometimes want to instruct God."
Servant of God John A. Hardon SJ
Fr. Hardon, Fr. Hardon--where have I read about him?
Oh, right--"Despite these admissions, Hardon concluded that his fellow Jesuit's actions were "objectively defensible," albeit "highly imprudent," and told McGuire's bosses that he "should be prudently allowed to engage in priestly ministry."
Enough from this guy!
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